Draft - Just a Small Town Kid

DRAFT

JUST A SMALL TOWN KID

THE BEGINNING!

I was born on the 29th day of August in 1951 around dinner time in North Wheeling Hospital located in the rivertown of Wheeling, West Virginia.? My mother always said it was the hottest day of the year and there was no air conditioning in the hospital room.??

Hell’s fire, it was 1951 in West Virginia so there wasn’t hardly any air conditioning anywhere to be found…at least not until the 1960’s.??

I remember the first house that we had whole house air conditioning was 1963 and it didn’t work most of the time because of one thing or another.

My mother would rant and rage about the AC system until she was blue in the face then my father would call the company that he bought it from and chew them out!

BOY THOSE WERE THE DAYS!

So I spent the first eight years and six months of my life growing up in the small town of Wellsburg, West Virginia where everyone knew each other and each other’s business…the kind of town that had low crime and everyone had a job so there was little poverty with the exception of a few.??

My father worked for Wheeling Steel as a draftsman and helped my uncle Earl run his Amoco station a couple of evenings a week so my uncle could have dinner with my aunt Lib.

They were not only family, they were our neighbors after all.

Our other neighbors owned Wheeling Steel and had butlers, nannies, house cleaners etc. working for them round the clock.

Our neighbor on the other side of the hedge was an attorney who would later be appointed a Federal Judge for campaigning for John F. Kennedy to get elected President.? Who by the way was at the neighbor’s house one afternoon for a political rally that my father attended and my mother had tea with Jacqueline Kennedy hosted by a friend of our family that afternoon.

We had a cleaning lady who came twice a week to help my mother keep up with our house.

Even with all the employment in that area, my Grandmother Gillispie who we lovingly called Boo Boo, always talked about people living on relief.??

Between my Grandmother and my father talking about being poor during the depression you would think that it still applied in the 50’s.??

So one day I asked Boo Boo what is relief, to which she replied that it was something that President Roosevelt created during the great depression where the government gave money to people who were out of work and some people were still on it.??

Who? I asked.?

She replied that she couldn’t tell me as they would be embarrassed if I knew.

That night at dinner my father asked my mother if anything came in the mail that day.

My mother replied that the monthly check from the government had arrived.

To which my father replied, “Well at least we can eat this month.”

My Lord, I thought we are living on relief!!!

So I asked my father if we were poor to which he responded without missing a note…”Yes son we are why do you ask?”

That’s when it hit me, that was why Boo Boo wouldn’t tell me who was on relief because it was our family.?

That’s why my parents always yelled at me for dragging my feet as brakes while coasting down hill riding my tractor on our driveway…”Quit dragging your feet…you are wearing out your shoes…we can’t afford to go around buying you new shoes!”

“Clean your plate… There are children starving in Europe who would die for a meal like the one that you don’t want to eat…”

“Don’t slam that door, we can't afford to replace it…what do you think, that money grows on trees???”

These types of comments would haunt me for many years.

Whenever I went anywhere that someone would remark that our family got a new car, new furniture, or some other new thing I would reply that we were poor and that someone must have given it to us.

Yes indeed my Grandmother Gillispie could tell you things that would not only haunt but scare you for many years.

A good example would be when she caught me standing on my head.

She instantly told me to stop as all the blood was draining from my body to my head and it would swell up like a large balloon which would cause my eyes to pop out of my head and I would bleed to death.

Of course I responded with “What are you talking about?”

To which she stated, “Don't you remember the boy down the street that died a few years ago?”

“No”, I replied.

“That’s how he died from standing on his head…so you better stop that or it will happen to you!”

Or she would make my favorite food for breakfast, soft boiled eggs.

As she carefully removed the shell from the egg white she would tell me to eat slowly so I wouldn’t eat any of the shell.

“Why?” I would ask?

Very calmly she replied “Because darling if you eat the shell it will go into your stomach and begin to cut the lining of your stomach out which will cause your stomach to expand from all the blood that’s collecting in your stomach, then it will swell up like a large balloon, then your belly button will pop out and you will bleed to death!? Because there will be nothing we can do to stop the bleeding and you will die!”

“Don’t you remember that little boy down the street that died that way a few years ago?”

“You don’t want to end your life the same way that he ended his!”

Then hand me the bowl with the soft boiled eggs and tell me to go sit at the table and eat my breakfast.

Don’t think that didn’t make you eat slow and be careful not to eat any egg shells!

MY MOTHER ALWAYS SAID MY GRANDMOTHER RULED WITH FEAR!

THE AWAKENING!

I first came to the realization of what I wanted to do with my life when I was five years old.??

I attended a production of Pinocchio in the auditorium at Wellsburg High School.?

I was so fascinated that there were two people in the belly of a whale on stage and that I could hear them and see them but they could not see or hear me or the other children in the audience.? Then the questions in my mind began as to how did they get that huge whale on stage and how did they get those two people inside the belly of the whale???

After the show ended, I was taken backstage to see how all of these marvelous and magical things that appeared and disappeared as the story transitioned during the performance.??

As soon as I saw the lights, the actors/actresses, the set pieces, the costumes, all the technicians scurrying about and the ropes going up the wall of the theatre to the darkness of the grid I knew that this is where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.??

The only question left was how was I going to be able to do this as I was just some kid from a small town in West Virginia.??

So at that moment in time I set my goal in life… to spend the rest of my life working in the entertainment business.??

I just had to find the way and I definitely had the will to accomplish the task at hand.

THE FIRST STEP!

Shortly thereafter, my mother told me that we were going to do something good for children who had an affliction on a Saturday morning in early spring.??

Of course I had no idea that this involved me dressing up in a pink bunny costume wearing my best Buster Brown shoes selling paper lapel roses for a nickel standing in front of Traubert’s Drug Store.??

So I figured that maybe this might help me get to my main dream to work in show business.???

Things started out slow that morning as there were not a whole lot of folks walking about the streets at 9:00 a.m. as the stores had not opened for business that day yet.

As soon as the town hall clock struck 10:00 a.m. that all changed and the hustle of selling paper flowers for a nickel was on…

That’s when it struck me that there might be a way of selling all my flowers early in the morning plus raising the most money for the day!

If I knew you were a person of means the price was not a nickel but a dime, and if I knew you were a doctor, lawyer, banker or someone important I would convince? you that I could deal on the price and sell you twenty for a dollar then you could sell them back to your clients for a dime to reclaim your dollar then give the extra nickel to the organization responsible for the fundraiser under my name.??

Afterall it was going to a good cause for children with an affliction and besides I was the one wearing the bunny costume, not them!?

As you can imagine I was the best of all the bunny rabbits that day plus I finished first selling all of my paper flowers and raising the most money before the lunch time rush.

THE NEXT STEP!

Then came the day at the age of six that I decided that my name needed to be changed if I was to become successful in the entertainment world.??

So I told my mother that I wanted to change my name to “Roy Rogers”...after she quit laughing…she informed me that was not possible as I was a minor.??

I of course replied that I was not a miner as I didn’t mine coal.?

Grandfather McMahon was a miner but he retired because of an accident in the mine.??

After my mother stopped laughing the second time she informed me that she was not talking about that kind of miner as minor was a reference for someone who was not of majority age!??

“Majority age?” I asked “what’s that?”?

To which she replied you have to be eighteen years old…I thought that’s three lifetimes my current age.??

My stage name idea died on the vine and perished that day, but my desire continued to reach my dream I had set for myself.

AFTER ALL THE GOAL WAS SET AND MY DREAM AND DESIRE JUST KEPT GETTING STRONGER!

THE LONG TRAIL AHEAD!

From that day forward I sang in the church and school choirs, performed in every school play and review. Later in life after we moved from Wellsburg to Parkersburg I would learn to play the tenor saxophone which led to playing in the school orchestra, marching band and jazz stage band.? I would perform and sing in anything that would get me in front of an audience.?

NEED TO EXPAND

High school plays and college scholarship section.

The college years.

Working for a union professionally during college section.

THE GOALS SET IN 1971

A couple years prior to graduation from college, I set myself four goals to accomplish in my lifetime working in the arts, entertainment and live events business.

• Build a theatre?
• Shoot a movie
• Work a show in New York?
• Work a show on the road??

OUT ON MY OWN

So on May 20th of 1973, I graduated from West Virginia University with a BFA in theatre, one of my goals I set in life during the mid sixties to obtain a college degree.

Therefore, I was not present for my commencement as I was beginning my career working professionally in the theatre for a summer stock company in Indiana.??

For the first four weeks I was involved in overhauling the lighting system, renovating the stage rigging and platform of a theatre in the round, plus completely renovating the scenic studio and then pushing on through with building sets and operating the lighting board for six major productions over the next twelve weeks.?

When the season ended I knew that the experience that I had acquired in sixteen weeks was almost as great as all four years of my formal education.?

However if it were not for my four years of study at WVU I would not have mastered the basic skills needed to accomplish what I had accomplished in that sixteen week period.

THE FLASHBACK IN TIME

Many years later in my adult life while working as a Union Stagehand for IATSE Local 12 in Columbus, Ohio, I was on a ten day marathon of working ten different rock shows in various theaters.? You would start the load in for the show at 8:00 a.m. work up to show time, go into the performance, then begin the process of loading out the show immediately afterwards and the last piece of gear would go on the last truck around 2:00 a.m. everyday!? So you only got about 3 to 4 hours of sleep per night.

I remember the marathon began on a Sunday at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium with Motley Crue and Saxon, two of the heaviest metal groups touring at the time.

As the show progressed these young chicks would run up to the stage and throw their thong underwear at the band members who would in return make obscene jesters and hang the undergarments on their microphones.?

And so the marathon continued the next day to the Palace theater where Tom Jones was going to do a show. Well wouldn’t you know some of the ladies in the audience rushed the stage and threw roses, bras and panties for Tom to pick up and make risqué remarks and jokes. Then someone’s husband in the audience would yell out “You pump up the tires buddy and I’ll drive her home”!

The marathon continued for seven more days working at the Ohio Theatre, the Mershon Auditorium, the Ohio Center just a complete blur of one group after another, all of the groups sounding the same, until on the tenth day it would be Luther Vandross, the Velvet Voice at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium to close out the marathon.?

Now there were a lot of women in the audience, I mean real women not some skinny ass, who were very enamored with Luther and these women would rush the stage and throw roses, braziers, girdles…girdles that Christopher Columbus would have tacked to the mast of the the Santa Maria to use as a sail to circumvent the ocean…just like the ones my Grandmother Gillispie would wear…and I flashed back to those Mondays when my grandmother would wash her girdles…after removing all the whalebone stays and after scrubbing the girdles by hand she would hang them out to dry on the line outdoors in the yard…they would flap and wave as the wind would blow them dry while all of God's creatures for three miles around would run for their lives as they were scared to death that one of the girdles would cut loose and devour them!

LORD SAVE US ALL AS MONDAYS WERE HARD ON GOD’S SMALL CREATURES!